One of the highlights of the ecclesial summer is the pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres. This year, many of my friends and colleagues set out to walk the 100km over three days in early June. During the pilgrimage, several livestreamed moments on the journey. One thing struck home immediately: these were people with clean faces. Not because they washed frequently; this was an inner cleanliness, a sort of gentle shining from within. Over three days they skipped, trudged, sang and prayed their way through the French countryside.
The pilgrimage to Chartres, although revived in this century, has a long history. The most famous relic at Chartres, the Veil of the Virgin, was donated by Charles the Bald in around 876. Its fame contributed to the development of the pilgrimage. Tradition claimed that Our Lady wore this garment on the day of Christ’s birth; tests have dated the silk to first-century Palestine. Once part of the longer pilgrimage to Santiago, going to Chartres soon became an important expression of piety in its own right.
The French poet and essayist Charles Péguy is credited with keeping the pilgrim route from Paris to Chartres alive in the 20th century. For most of his life, Péguy was an ardent socialist who found himself at odds with the views of the Church. Shortly after experiencing a conversion of heart, Péguy made a pilgrimage from Notre-Dame in Paris to Chartres Cathedral to pray for his son, who was very ill. He recovered, and Péguy walked the route several times more before he died in battle during the First World War. His friends continued to make the pilgrimage in his memory.
In recent years the Chartres pilgrimage has become associated with the Traditional Latin Mass; what surprises some people is that it attracts so many Catholic youth.
This is either counterintuitive or contradictory to many observers; it offends every aspect of secular progressive commentary. It even offends perspectives that until recently were nurtured in the upper echelons of the Vatican. The assumption was that everything the Tridentine Rite represented would be anathema to those who properly reflected youth culture as it was understood. Instead, the opposite seems to be true: a tipping point has been reached.
The cultural current since the end of the Second World War has been for an intensification of what we might call the horizontal aspect of social perspective: informality, accessibility, simplicity, stimulation and entertainment. Youth culture in particular has pursued an intense version of this, sometimes extending it to the point of anarchy. But it is as if this overdosing on the horizontal has produced an adverse reaction. In this generation, a growing proportion of young people have overdosed on the informality, found the uniformly enforced horizontal dimension an affront, and are looking for an antidote to an extremism that has become toxic to their souls.
The French in particular have chosen the word “horizontal” to explain what they are famished for. We might add to it “transcendence” and “mystery”, “formality” and “authority” — what several generations ago was described as “numinous”, the subject of Rudolf Otto’s great book <em>The Idea of the Holy</em>. It might be tempting to see this as part of a swing of a pendulum. Over the last 60 years, the interpreters of the Second Vatican Council have set out to accommodate Catholicism to a rapidly changing culture. Commentators have presented it as the replacement of formality by informality, transcendence by immanence, mystery by rationality; although this is true, it may not be the heart of the matter.
Rod Dreher has addressed what he sees as the deepest aspect of the crisis of unbelief in secularism as the disenchantment of the world: a materialistic filtering that removes the miraculous and supernatural from the palette of perception. This is what fervent young Catholics mean when they talk about the “vertical” in the old rite. It is more than transcendence — it is the gift of the perception of re-enchantment; a re-evaluation of spirit and miracle within a context of materialism that recognises functionality but not meaning.
It is a great mistake to miscategorise this as nostalgia, rigidity or some form of religious sectarianism with schismatic tendencies. It is a serious and profound response to an analysis of the corruption of a culture. G.K. Chesterton was right when he observed: “Those who marry the spirit of the age will find themselves widows in the next”, but the Catholic youth on the Chartres pilgrimage also show both the Church and the world what the spirit of the age got so badly wrong.
<em> (Photo by STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP via Getty Images)</em>
